{"id":5479,"date":"2006-10-19T11:54:26","date_gmt":"2006-10-19T15:54:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=5479"},"modified":"2022-10-11T22:31:58","modified_gmt":"2022-10-12T02:31:58","slug":"assia-wevill","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=5479","title":{"rendered":"The Haunting Face of Assia Wevill"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe style=\"width:120px;height:240px;\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"0\" src=\"\/\/ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com\/widgets\/q?ServiceVersion=20070822&#038;OneJS=1&#038;Operation=GetAdHtml&#038;MarketPlace=US&#038;source=ac&#038;ref=tf_til&#038;ad_type=product_link&#038;tracking_id=thesheivari-20&#038;marketplace=amazon&#038;region=US&#038;placement=0786721057&#038;asins=0786721057&#038;linkId=M5VSNX2SRL5ROENH&#038;show_border=true&#038;link_opens_in_new_window=true\"><br \/>\n<\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>\nPlath fans will recognize that name.  That and Shura Wevill.<\/p>\n<p>Apparently there&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/books.guardian.co.uk\/departments\/biography\/story\/0,,1925625,00.html\">a biography out now of Assia Wevill<\/a> &#8211; that&#8217;s kind of an interesting article and review there &#8211; but it does take the &#8220;Ted Hughes is a villain&#8221; attitude which I find rather tiresome. There may be some truth to that (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/news\/main.jhtml?xml=\/news\/2006\/09\/09\/nhughes09.xml\">here&#8217;s another recent article on Hughes<\/a>) &#8211; he may have been a total bastard when it came to romance &#8211; but still: should we turn this man on a flaming pyre for all eternity?  How sorry can one person be for having a damn affair?  So I&#8217;m not really into the &#8220;Ted Hughes is evil&#8221; thing. Human lives are complicated.  Affairs and suicides and emotions are not easy &#8211; especially not for intense people like these three.  I&#8217;ve flip-flopped my allegiances through my years of being a Plath fan.  There is never just one side to a situation like this one &#8211; a situation which is, frankly, a total MESS.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t know if I&#8217;ll read the biography &#8211; but it was an interesting thing to hear those names, to have all of these associations come up in my head &#8211; just from reading Plath&#8217;s poems, and all the biographies.   She&#8217;s a glimmering witch-woman in Plath&#8217;s fantasy &#8230; a sleek cold Germanic mistress, who slinked into her husband&#8217;s life and whisked him away.  This is Plath&#8217;s side of things.  But Assia, in and of herself, is not interesting.  Or &#8211; at least not like Hughes and Plath are interesting.  Hughes and Plath are more interesting because of their art and their fame.   Assia is peripheral to the two of them &#8211; and it seems like she knew that herself, and that was part of her suicide.  She would never &#8220;get in there&#8221; with Plath and Hughes.  What did Assia do besides break up a marriage and then kill herself and her child?  Not to disrespect her, seriously &#8211; but her interest here is how she intersected with 2 famous people.  That&#8217;s the fact.  She knew it.<\/p>\n<p>But still.  I first read Plath&#8217;s stuff in high school &#8211; and since then &#8211; I have read every biography, every critical study &#8211; I came to Hughes late, because I had a bit of that &#8220;he&#8217;s a villain, I won&#8217;t buy his books&#8221; feeling &#8211; which is moronic.  The guy is a master.<\/p>\n<p>What I&#8217;m trying to say is that I don&#8217;t know any of these people &#8211; but just from all the books and articles and poems I have read &#8211; I got a jolt of something almost like fear seeing those names this morning.<\/p>\n<p>Assia and Shura Wevill.<\/p>\n<p>Fear?  Why fear?  I guess it&#8217;s because I imagine Ted Hughes&#8217; response.  Hughes&#8217; first moment in hearing the news that Assia had killed herself and their daughter.  I mean &#8230; the mind boggles.  The mind BOGGLES at trying to comprehend this.<\/p>\n<p>\n<img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2006\/10\/assiawevill.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"340\" height=\"370\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-179768\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2006\/10\/assiawevill.jpg 340w, https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2006\/10\/assiawevill-184x200.jpg 184w, https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2006\/10\/assiawevill-92x100.jpg 92w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 340px) 100vw, 340px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>It gives me a shiver, a shiver of freezing cold horror, to imagine what Ted Hughes must have endured.<\/p>\n<p>\n<iframe style=\"width:120px;height:240px;\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"0\" src=\"\/\/ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com\/widgets\/q?ServiceVersion=20070822&#038;OneJS=1&#038;Operation=GetAdHtml&#038;MarketPlace=US&#038;source=ac&#038;ref=tf_til&#038;ad_type=product_link&#038;tracking_id=thesheivari-20&#038;marketplace=amazon&#038;region=US&#038;placement=0786721057&#038;asins=0786721057&#038;linkId=M5VSNX2SRL5ROENH&#038;show_border=true&#038;link_opens_in_new_window=true\"><br \/>\n<\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Plath fans will recognize that name. That and Shura Wevill. Apparently there&#8217;s a biography out now of Assia Wevill &#8211; that&#8217;s kind of an interesting article and review there &#8211; but it does take the &#8220;Ted Hughes is a villain&#8221; &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=5479\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[9],"tags":[88,607],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5479"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5479"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5479\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":179769,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5479\/revisions\/179769"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}